I have said this here before but it definitely bears repeating: over the past seven years or so a series of BFI screenings, publications and DVD releases has rewritten the history of the British documentary. This is an achievement that has, as yet, been insufficiently celebrated – and of course the task is far from complete. Much of what we’ve learned and seen anew has been to do with cinema and industrial documentaries and we still have the glories of television documentary to discover. But already we can understand more fully and engage more deeply with and simply and straighhforwardly see an enormously rich filmmaking heritage from the early 1930s to the late 1970s (and occasionally beyond). And the latest instalment of the project is this month’s initiative This Working Life: Steel which was launched on Tuesday evening at BFI Southbank. Here’s the trailer…
I posted yesterday about my discovery of the remarkable book The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems, which published in English by The Focal Press in 1948. Do take a look at that blog for an introduction to the volume, and allow me to return to it here to highlight two strands that I find of particular interest. One its its unabashed Marxist analysis of the woes of the film industry, illustrated with wonderful diagrams of monopoly capitalism in action (a detail of one is above). The other line of thought that chimes with much that I am thinking about in current productions is concerned with the distinctions between Film (which is often capitalised in the book and regarded as essentially monolithic) and Theatre (ditto). read more »
One afternoon in Canterbury recently I stumbled upon The Chaucer Bookshop, a second-hand treasure house that I realised I had last entered as a schoolboy some forty years ago. I was delighted to find that it was thriving in this age of Amazon, and I was thrilled to discover several books about film and television (the only ones I in any sense collect) that I had never come across before. Foremost among these was a handsome 1948 volume from The Falcon Press: The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems by Georg Schmidt, Werner Schmalenbach and Peter Bachlin, and with Hermann Eidenbenz (the links may need Google Translate) as its art editor. Printed on heavy, shiny paper, this is an extraordinary volume entirely deserving of the discussion of its genesis, its analysis and its truly remarkable design that I aim to develop in this post and a follow-up. read more »
On Friday Netflix made available simultaneously all thirteen episodes of its House of Cards re-make (above). The serial, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher, has had a mixed press – Alessandra Stanley for The New York Times described it as ‘a delicious immorality play with an excellent cast, but the tempo is slow and oddly ponderous’. But it is the innovative release strategy that has attracted most attention. This has been shaped by the recognition that in the age of DVDs and DVRs our viewing habits are changing in fundamental ways. As Brian Selter writes in The New York Times, ‘People have been known to brag about finishing a whole 12-episode season of Homeland in one sitting.’ (We watched just the three shows on Friday night.) Selter is good on the changes, as is Mark Sweney for the Guardian and Tim Carmody for The Verge, who says House of Cards is ‘more like a thirteen-part movie than episodic TV’. Across the jump, more links to more interesting stuff, with recommendation h/ts to among others @nictate, @annehelen, @prodnose, @bergersmicer and @Geoff_Andrew. read more »
I have my colleague Todd Macdonald to thank for the weekend’s first clip: a timelapse panorama of the courtyard observed by Jeff (James Stewart, above) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Todd was laid up with a bug for much of the week and instead of spying on his neighbours he watched a lot of stuff online – and chronicled this on a blog post. Jeff Desom‘s remix was one of his discoveries – and it’s a revelatory reworking of the film and the studio space in which it was made. The artist also shows this as an installation. Across the jump there are nine other clips that I encountered during the week that I hope you may enjoy.
Thanks to the eclectic and extraordinarily extensive DVD releases from Network we can now see a remarkable range of ITV programmes from the past forty or so years. Who would have thought that the obscure serial Adam Smith, which was one of Trevor Griffiths’ earliest scriptwriting assignments, would one day have a life beyond its religious programming slot back in 1972? But there it is in the Network catalogue (although oddly available only until 6 February) along with The Persuaders, Sergeant Cork and many more. Network have also released DVDs of single dramas from Armchair Theatre (the link is to Volume 1, and each of the four collections deserve their own blog post) and now – thrillingly for those of us interested in the history of arts television – there is a double DVD of films from the ABC Weekend Television arts magazine series Tempo (1961-67). Today’s post is an introduction to this truly significant release, following which I intend to write some further Friday posts about individual films. read more »
Another post from our archives, this time from 8 March 2011, when I was about to teach a very similar class to the one that I will give at the Royal College of Art tomorrow.
I am delighted to be contributing a quartet of classes to David Crowley’sCritical Writing in Art & Design course at the Royal College of Art. Our first two sessions considered television films about Henry Moore and then Kenneth Clark and Simon Schama. Tomorrow, the third session focusses on alternatives to the dominant traditions of arts programming on British television, and one key example is the 1987 series State of the Artthat Illuminations produced for Channel 4. The series is published by us along with an interview with the series’ writer Sandy Nairne (available here as a double DVD for £39.99). It’s one of the major projects with which we’ve been involved and it remains close to the core of the company. And this despite the fact that when it was first shown it was roundly abused by almost everyone. read more »
I thought others might do this to mark the anniversary today of the publication of Jane Austen’s great and glorious Pride and Prejudice. But as I’ve yet to see such an anthology, I thought I would make one for myself – and anyone else fascinated by how dear Jane has been adapted for the cinema, television and now the web across the years. Here, then, are 12 clips for a 200th birthday. (There were originally 10 clips in this post, but I am grateful to Stuart Ian Burns – see comment below – for pointing out my omission of Lost in Austen, which is now included below, along with the trailer for Bride and Prejudice.)
1. Pride and Prejudice, 1940
Below is the original trailer for the Hollywood adaptation with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Robert Z. Leonard directed with Aldous Huxley (!) as one of the credited scriptwriters. The film was derived from the 1936 stage version written by Helen Jerome and is set several decades later than the time of the novel. According to Wikipedia,
The film is substantially different from the novel in a number of ways; most notably, the confrontation near the end of the film between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet was radically altered, changing the former’s haughty demand that Elizabeth promise never to marry Darcy into a hoax to test the mettle and sincerity of Elizabeth’s love.
I’m not going to apologise for leading again with Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow(above), the Sundance-premiered film that was shot in secret at Disney World and Disneyland. I particularly want to draw your attention to It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Disney world, in which Tim Wu at The New Yorker writes on the ‘fair use’ issues prompted by the film (on which Disney has yet to comment) Wu is spot on when he says that the film
ultimately raises a larger question of what you might call cultural freedom, or the freedom to comment on or reimagine the great cultural icons of our time… a world where Disney gets to determine everything said about Disney World would be a poor place indeed.
Bravo, bravo. Across the jump, more links from the week to stuff about television, digital media and movies, with h/ts for recommendations to @KeyframeDaily, @Chi_Humanities and, as so often, @brainpicker. I realise it’s a slightly austere and downbeat list this week, but that feels like the way of the world at present. read more »
A selection of interesting videos that I came across during the past week and – well, that’s it really… Above is an image from the Saul Bass title sequence to Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), a film discussed by Christian Keathley in no 10. below.
1. Richard II, directed by Rupert Goold, BBC, 2012
Why not? Following the news this week that David Tennant is to play the king for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the autumn, here is a brief reminder of last year’s The Hollow Crown presentation (discussed in my blog post here) with Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt chastising Ben Whishaw’s Richard.
